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Updated: May 5, 2025
The field-paths would have been a matter of perplexity, had it not been for the well-known gaps in the dyke-side, which showed the whitened land beyond, between the two dark stone walls.
Question crowded upon question, and doubt upon doubt, until he could bear it no longer, and starting from the floor on which at last he had sunk prostrate, he rushed in all but involuntary haste from the house, and scarcely knew where he was until, in a sort, he came to himself some little distance from the town, wandering hurriedly in field-paths. It was a fair morning of All Hallows' summer.
Here is a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture he had a Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be overstepped for ever.
All other forms of dream deserted him but two: he still occasionally reads the most delightful books, he still visits at times the most delightful places; and it is perhaps worthy of note that to these same places, and to one in particular, he returns at intervals of months and years, finding new field-paths, visiting new neighbours, beholding that happy valley under new effects of noon and dawn and sunset.
The field-paths are in many places a foot deep in mud, for the autumn has been wet. They are ploughing the Ten Acres, and the plough is going along the top ridge so that horses and men are distinctly outlined, two men and four horses, but the pace is slow, for the ground is very heavy. I can just hear the ploughman talking to his team.
"I knows most o' th' padding kind, trampers and sech. There'll be many going Tonbridge way to-day and tomorrow, because o' the fair." "Then cannot we reach Tonbridge by ways unfrequented?" "There's the field-paths, though 'twill take us a day longer maybe two " "No matter, let us go by the field-paths, Diana."
Clover, violets, and hedge-roses, breathe from their leaves; they are most lovable in cool lanes, along field-paths, or upon stiles overhung by hawthorn; while the black-bird pipes, and the nightingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse.
December 14, 1888. The danger of art as an occupation is that one uses life, looks at life, as so much material for one's art. Life becomes a province of art, instead of art being a province of life. That is all a sad mistake, perhaps an irreparable mistake! I walked to-day on the crisp frozen snow, down the valley, by field-paths, among leafless copses and wood-ends.
Late on the next Sunday afternoon Gifford had gone for a country walk which he had arranged to bring him round in time for the evening service at the little village church of Wynford standing just outside the park boundary. His way took him by well-remembered field-paths which, although towards the end of his walk darkness had set in, he had no difficulty in tracing.
I had occasion to visit some patients whose houses lay scattered many miles apart, and for that reason, as well as from the desire for some quick bodily exercise which is so natural an effect of irritable perturbation of mind, I had made the journey on horseback instead of using a carriage that I could not have got through the lanes and field-paths by which alone the work set to myself could be accomplished in time.
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